(National Sentinel) Misappropriated: The Internal Revenue Service says it has discovered nearly 1.3 million cases where illegal aliens have stolen identities of Americans or filed returns using fraudulent Social Security numbers.

In response to questions from CNSNews, the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration said, “We identified 1,227,579 electronically filed tax returns, processed in FY 2017 through April 18, 2017, in which the Individual Taxpayer Identification Number on the return does not match the Social Security Number on the Form W-2.”

Further, the agency said, between processing years 2011 and 2016, “the IRS placed the employment identity theft marker on 1,346,485 taxpayer accounts,” according to a TIGTA report from last month.

Asked by the news site how many of these cases “did the IRS refer to federal law enforcement for criminal investigation and prosecution? How many did they not refer to law enforcement and why not?” TIGTA responded: “We do not have this information.”

“Over the last few years, IRS-Criminal Investigation prioritized its limited resources pursuing identity thieves who stole millions of identities from innocent taxpayers and applied for, and received, tax refunds based on those identities,” TIGTA added in response to a question about successful prosecutions of employment identity theft, according to Newsmax.

“Additionally, based on how IRS-CI captures case-related information and how prosecutions are based (the federal violation utilized), it is not possible to ascertain the exact information for the question regarding how many cases the IRS pursued criminally where [Individual Tax Identification Numbers] holders utilized another individuals’ [Social Security Number].”